[su_vimeo url=”https://vimeo.com/156752567″]

Artist Statement:

For my PSA I decided I wanted to try modeling a realistic character. I learned to sculpt and texture in mudbox for this project which was something I’d never tried. I didn’t really have a clear idea of what I was going to do with this PSA, I just knew I wanted to work on a realistic character. In the end, the character became a Monk. This was partially because I didn’t want to create a hair system and he just sort of had that look to him as he was developed. Because I was short on time I decided to work on simple animation. I learned more about Maya paint effects to create the tree and I worked with ncloth but it was too slow so I then learned about wraps. The hardest part of the PSA was getting the clothes to deform with the body but because I modeled them separately from different primitives, It was very hard to accomplish, so there are parts in the video were the body shows through the clothes. I also had to learn about working with normal maps, and rigging a high poly mesh vs a low poly mesh. Because my scene was so dense in polygon count and had a short time limit, I had to render using Maya hardware renderer 2.0. During my trails with trying different renderers, I learned a lot about each one and also tried some new ones like vray and renderman. I feel the modeling and texturing of the monk is my best work yet but the rest of the project isn’t quite up to par and I wasn’t able to accomplish everything in the rest of the scene that I wanted too. Overall I feel I learned a lot of information during this project that I can take into other projects in the future.8″]